The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. In his book Brooklyn, and in the movie based upon it, the Irish author Colm Toibin has told a story which brings life to an America now long gone. It is the story of a young woman, Eilis Lacey, who lives in a small...
Year: 2016
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Roe at 43: Defy It
Today, many souls are braving the weather in Washington, D.C., to testify to the truth that the United States is a rich gutter country that guts millions of babies, guts women, and has disemboweled herself in an act of worship before the god of Mammon. Steaming and bleeding on the ground before her staggering and...
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Revenge of the Castaway
Two years after Sam Francis’ untimely death, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a long essay about Francis titled “The Castaway.” The title came from an email Francis sent to friends (including me) after William F. Buckley described him as one of the “castaways” from the conservative movement. This was Francis’ response to Buckley: “As I have...
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Is the Spectre of Trump Haunting Davos?
The lights are burning late in Davos tonight. At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.” Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in...
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In Clear Violation
The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement. A “symposium” of anti-Trump...
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Why Is Japan Dying?
It’s Jan. 22, 2016, the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that has killed more than 60 million babies here. But this year, let’s turn to Japan. Fortune magazine ran an article titled, “Why Japan’s Economic Troubles Should Worry the U.S.” It warned that the world’s third...
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Is Iran Taking the China Road?
Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only? So they must be muttering around the barracks of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps today. For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what ayatollah agreed to. Last week, he gave...
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US, Iran Step Back From the Brink
To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran’s Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories. In January 1968, LBJ’s last year, 82 sailors of the Pueblo were captured by North Korea and held hostage with...
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Swan Song From Our Second Worst President
President Obama’s final State of the Union address was long on themes and short on specifics. It clearly was an attempt to secure a legacy of accomplishment. That attempt is at best questionable. It is important to divide Obama’s record between what he failed to do and what he has succeeded in doing—most of it bad. Either...
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Opposition to Merkelism Grows
Angela Merkel’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of Islamic migrants into Germany won her praise from the press last year, with the Guardian reporting that grateful migrants had dubbed her “Mama Merkel” and TIME naming her Person of the Year. The migrants are still looking up to Merkel—one of those arrested after the mass...
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What Bernie & The Donald Portend
Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, and clarity emerges. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is in trouble. Polls show her slightly ahead of Socialist Bernie Sanders in Iowa, but narrowly behind in New Hampshire. And the weekend brought new revelations about yet more classified and secret documents sent over her private email server...
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Horror in Europe
On New Year’s Eve 121 German women were subjected to sexual attacks, robbery and violence by “concentric rings” of a thousand Middle Eastern and African migrants in and around the central railway station in Cologne. Women and girls were surrounded, poked and jeered at as “whores” and even worse insults; their blouses were ripped and...
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Farewell to Downton
Like many Americans, I spent Sunday evening watching the beginning of the final season of Downton Abbey. The show has become a huge hit, at least by PBS standards, with some 25,000,000 or so American viewers. At first glance, this success is surprising. A few years ago, The Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that...
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Why Is North Korea Our Problem?
For Xi Jinping, it has been a rough week. Panicked flight from China’s currency twice caused a plunge of 7 percent in her stock market, forcing a suspension of trading. Kim Jong Un, the megalomaniac who runs North Korea, ignored Xi’s warning and set off a fourth nuclear bomb. While probably not a hydrogen bomb...
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Will the GOP Establishment Opt for President Hillary?
The Iowa caucuses are under a month away, and the GOP Establishment is in white-knuckle panic that Donald Trump’s candidacy has not imploded. His rather moderate proposal for a temporary time-out on Muslims’ entry into the U.S. has gone the way of its predecessors in actually boosting his numbers. Allegations of sexist misuse of a Yiddish expression have fallen...
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War on Christmas 2015
I first wrote about the War on Christmas in 2001, when Chronicles published my essay “Happy Holidays! Bah Humbug!: in the December 2001 issue. Peter Brimelow, the editor of VDARE.com, republished that essay. Since then, I have written at least one article each Christmas on the topic. What follows is the piece Peter Brimelow asked...
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Will Mideast Allies Drag Us Into War?
The New Year’s execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation. Its first purpose: Signal the new ruthlessness and resolve of the Saudi monarchy where the power behind the throne is the octogenarian King Salman’s son, the 30-year-old Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Second, crystallize, widen and...
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Is Christianity Coming to an End in the Middle East?
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. While most victims of war and terrorism in the Middle East are Muslims, we have been witnessing a growing assault upon Christianity by ISIS and other Islamist groups. The proportion of Middle Easterners who are Christian has dropped from 14% in 1910 to 4%...
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More Annals of the Stupid Party
Donald Trump has certainly revolutionized American politics. And he did so by a very simple act—mentioning substantive truths that other Republicans fear to utter. Trump is not perfect. But criticism at this point (some from over-fastidious Chronicles writers) is like Titanic survivors complaining about accommodations on the lifeboats. No ordinary man would climb into the...
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National Review at 60
National Review celebrated its 60th anniversary last November. Its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., would have been days away from turning 90. He is all over the anniversary issue, in a somewhat exploitive way—many photographs and reminders of his celebrity status, including an image of the brand of peanut butter he endorsed. Indeed, just as...
Issue
January 2016
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Tommy Flanagan
Early one evening in the mid-1980’s, jazz pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who in 1951-52 had performed and recorded with star bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, was having a bad first set at Bradley’s, New York City’s premier jazz piano bar. Bishop’s sense of time was off, he was missing notes, and he even seemed disoriented...
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That Demagogue
In the November issue, Justin Raimondo characterizes Rand Paul as weak-kneed, neocon-appeasing, and spineless (“Who Hates Trump?,” Between the Lines). I’m not sure why Mr. Raimondo does this; however, he does make one observation about Donald Trump that I think is important. He states that Trump “may be . . . a demagogue who will...
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Putin, Planes, and Position
Russian President Vladimir Putin was furious following the late-November destruction of a Russian war plane by Turkish fighter jets over Syrian airspace. The Russians had been bombing “terrorist” positions inside war-torn Syria since September. Less than two weeks before the incident, Putin thought he had reached agreement with his Turkish counterpart, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, on...
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Protest Too Much
On the campuses of America, fascism lives, although these modern fascists lack the sartorial brilliance of Benito’s mobs. It started with a swastika applied to a bathroom wall at the University of Missouri, and today our black brethren and their leftist white allies control more than three-dozen college campuses, disrupting student life with a very...
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Drafting Our Daughters
The leftist regime, incarnate in bold and belligerent Democrats and tepid, me-too Republicans, hates women, the same way it hates black people. The way you can tell is that you often hear them screaming (or sobbing) exactly the opposite, as justification for the passage of unprecedented social-engineering laws. Yet judging by the effects of both...
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What the Editors Are Reading
I’ve been reading and rereading Raymond Chandler’s novels for more than 30 years; also his Letters, the best epistolary volume by an “American” writer (Chandler was an Englishman who arrived in Los Angeles as a young man to work for an oil executive), with the sole exception of Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being. Chandler...
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Of Paradigms and Penectomies
“Conservatives engage in rebellions, not revolutions.” How true, and what a way to begin a book. The Conservative Rebellion is part memoir, part intellectual and political history by a scholar who came of age in the revolutionary 1960’s, when fashionable people viewed rebels as Parliament viewed the Boston Minutemen. (King George III, however, considered George...
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Grey Lady in Rainbow Panties
My family lived, while I was growing up, at 29 Claremont Avenue between Riverside Drive and Broadway, in an elaborately decorated apartment building of ivory-colored stone directly overlooking the Barnard College campus and the copper roofs, weathered to a lichenous green, of Columbia University beyond. Lionel and Diana Trilling and their son, my schoolmate at...
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Effeminate Synod
The patient lies on the table. He’s been beaten badly about the head, and burns show round his neck, as if he had been dragged by a rope. Bright red blood trickles out of one ear. He has lost his trousers, and his shirt is in shreds. He cannot tell you what day it is. ...
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Trump Said What?
The nation held its breath in mid-December when GOP candidate Donald Trump dared to suggest that, in the wake of an ISIS/ISIL/IS/Caliphate/Daesh-related terrorist attack on U.S. soil, all Muslim immigration should be halted, until “Congress can figure out what the hell is going on.” When the press finally exhaled, it started screaming and hollering, pausing...
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Outside In
Immediately following the jihadist bombings in Paris, President François Hollande announced that he was declaring a three-month national state of emergency, closing the French borders, and treating the attacks as “an act of war.” Two nights later French planes began attacking ISIS in Syria, and two days after that Hollande and Vladimir Putin agreed to...
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Religion Is Always There
The varied and complex relations between religion and power can be understood only by means of extensive comparisons, between nations and across time. Who better to demonstrate this than Prof. David Martin, the doyen of the comparative sociology of religion? Martin’s first achievement is to refute “the general theory of secularisation,” which has enjoyed so...
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The Future of Publishing
In 2004, a middle-aged English businessman named George Courtauld decided to put together a slim, illustrated album for his three young sons. It was called The Pocket Book of Patriotism. The original idea had come to him on a crowded train home from work to his house in the countryside east of London on Christmas...
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Erdogan’s Ambush
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian Su-24 bomber over northwestern Syria on November 24 may be a game changer in that strategically positioned Middle Eastern country. Various parties have been forced to declare their true agendas. Strategic clarity is finally emerging, which is the precondition for an eventual solution—even though no solution is yet in...
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R.I.P., Mr. Chairman
David A. Hartman passed from this life on November 24, at the age of 79. Though it has been some time since his writing appeared in these pages, Mr. Hartman’s influence will be felt as long as Chronicles remains in print. As his close friend, collaborator, and fellow board member Tom Pauken rightly noted in...
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Bernardino and Islam
Unlike Osama bin Laden, who chose to launch his attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, as a symbolic reversal of the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Vienna on that date in 1683, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, prosecuted their jihad in San Bernardino because that is where they lived...
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Thoroughly Modern Muslims
Allah (ta’ala) said, {They thought that their fortresses would protect them from Allah but Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts so they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers. So take warning, O people of vision} [Al-Hashr:2]. In...
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Winners & Losers: 2015
Each year, The McLaughlin Group, the longest-running panel show on national TV, which began in 1982, announces its awards for the winners and losers and the best and the worst of the year. Rereading my list of 39 awardees suggests something about how our world is changing. As “Person of the Year” and “Biggest Winner,”...
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Contain the Caliphate
“Quarantine the aggressors!” That line out of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech signaling the beginning of his open road to war with the Axis powers was much criticized by anti-interventionists, who correctly saw that the President was trying to undermine the great principle of neutrality which had, thus far, kept us out of the European war. ...
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Flame of Hope
The 21st century has not so far been a happy time for American conservatives. It began with an appalling terrorist attack whose key perpetrators had taken advantage of our government’s insouciance toward mass immigration from the Third World. Instead of reversing the trend toward demographic transformation, the authorities doubled down on it: We now accept...
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Buried in History
In the summer of 2015, thanks to the generosity of friends, ex-students, and parents whose children I now teach, I spent a month in Rome. Since my return to the United States, several friends and family members have asked me to record my general impressions of “the Eternal City.” So here goes. First, Rome offers...
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Come Into the Garden, Maud
A year after the American debut of Jascha Heifetz in 1917, James Huneker wrote an interesting sentence in the New York Times: “Much has been said of Heifetz and his musical gifts compared with great violinists of the time—Ysayë, Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, Kubelik, and Maud Powell.” We notice that one of these great violinists is...
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A Visit to Ali Pasha
“Why do you go to Ioannina”? Pronouncing the town’s name very carefully in four syllables for our benefit, our driver broke the silence of several hours on the road from Athens during which the entire conversation had been limited to driving time and route information. I wanted to say, “?ληθ?ς, δεν ξ?ρω,” (“Truly, I don’t...
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The Politics of Air Strikes
To bomb or not to bomb? As I write, that is the question being debated in the Palace of Westminster. The Conservative government, predictably enough, is itching to join the attacks on ISIS in Syria. Prime Minister David Cameron says we cannot leave it to France and America to obliterate terrorists in the Middle East...
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The End of American Exceptionalism?
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have written a book entitled Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt on August 29, with the headline “Restoring American Exceptionalism.” In the excerpt, Cheney sought to identify his views on foreign policy with those of Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. That...
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Compromised Fidelities
Spotlight Produced by Anonymous Content and Participant Media Director by Tom McCarthy Screenplay by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer Distributed by Open Road Films Trumbo Produced by Groundswell Productions Directed by Jay Roach Screenplay by John McNamara Distributed by Bleeker Street Media In 2000, the Boston Globe hires Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) to be editor-in-chief. ...